An internationally recognized counterterrorism expert endorsed the proposed liquefied natural gas terminal at the Sparrows Point peninsula, saying an attack wouldn?t yield enough deaths to attract terrorists.
President George W. Bush?s former anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke penned a report supporting the terminal in Baltimore?s harbor Wednesday ? a victory for the Virgina-based AES Corp., which is battling Baltimore County residents and elected officials who call the terminal a terrorism magnet and fear an explosion could kill residents who live about 1.3 miles from the site.
AES hired Clarke to study the proposal and his full report will be released soon, he said.
“Here, there?s nothing within a mile,” Clarke told The Examiner. “There?s no scenario we could come up with where there are large numbers of casualties.”
Clarke, whose condemning study of a proposed LNG terminal in Providence, R.I., convinced the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to deny the application, also investigated an AES proposal in Boston, which he endorsed.
Under the Baltimore plan, massive tankers would carry ultra-cold liquefied natural gas into the harbor. The gas would be transferred to an on-shore terminal, where it would be revaporized and sent through an 88-mile pipeline into Southern Pennsylvania via Harford County.
Clarke?s study, which used safety guidelines drafted by the Sandia National Laboratories, recommends several security measures including posting armed security guards, equipping the nearby Turners Station neighborhood with a loudspeaker system and installing swimmer detection devices.
Clarke said even in a worst-case scenario, if a vapor cloud dispersed and then ignited, residents would probably be safe.
“They would see it, they would hear it, they would feel heat,” Clarke said. “But it would probably burn itself out in less than a minute.”
Project critics, who also allege the dredging required to accommodate the tankers would disturb contaminated sediment at the bottom of the harbor, criticized the findings. They said the one-mile safety guidelines are based largely on models and assumptions, not empirical data.
“Sandia National Laboratories? conclusions are based on five different models, and they all give different results,” said Dunbar Brooks, who lives in Turners Station. “In the worst-case scenario of those models, it causes problems.”
AES officials agreed not to edit or influence Clarke?s report, he said. He said he did not study terrorism risks associated with the pipeline.
